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3.63 AVERAGE
3.63 AVERAGE
adventurous
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Very very boring, way too long. Honestly I could tell you very little about it because I didn't retain much.
Wait... this was written by the lead singer of the Decemberists?!? It all makes sense now.
The best way to describe Wildwood is an American Narnia. Prue's baby brother is abducted by a murder of crows and taken into the Impassable Wilderness outside Portland. She ventures there with her friend Curtis to get him back. In the IW she meets talking animals, bandits, villains, mystics and all kinds other people. Some helpful some not so helpful. Curtis and Prue are separated and have to make their own way through Wildwood but they eventually join back together to help save the day at the end. There is a lot of adventure, heroics and a bit a scariness in this book. The characters are good. Prue and Curtis are well written heroes; sure they have their faults but they turn out good in the end. The villain...the Dowager Governess is a nice one; she is the villain but she also tries to turn you to her side. The secondary characters are also fun: the postmaster, the bandit king, the avian prince. If I have a complaint about this book it is that it is long for a children's book (over 500 pages) and the language does get a bit stuffy at times. But the illustrations are fun and I think if kids stick with it they will enjoy it. It is part of a trilogy, but this volume ends well enough that I don't think you will have to continue reading if you don't want to.
The story line was rather well done, but there were a lot of disconnects. The vocabulary of the 12 year old children were well above their pay grade and the use of those polysyllabic GRE words was rather pretentious. The characters were rather stereotypical for their roles, but I admit that I was curious to how it was going to end.
My biggest issue with the book is that this could not have been written by a parent. The somewhat aloofness of the author on the subject of missing children seemed to be ranked somewhere below an afterthought. The first time the protagonist runs off with her friend is one thing, but then allowing the protagonist to actually run off again and into harm's way. That seemed outside the realm of plausibility. The flippancy surrounding the other child and the protagonist's conversation with her friend's parents at the end cemented for me that no responsible parent could have written this book.
As I said, it kept my interest, and the imagery was very well done as I 'read' the audiobook and not the illustrated book. The writer is rather gifted in his use of words, but given the disjunctive nature of the subplots, I will terminate my venture into this series here. If he writes another book outside this series, I will give it an opportunity.
My biggest issue with the book is that this could not have been written by a parent. The somewhat aloofness of the author on the subject of missing children seemed to be ranked somewhere below an afterthought. The first time the protagonist runs off with her friend is one thing, but then allowing the protagonist to actually run off again and into harm's way. That seemed outside the realm of plausibility. The flippancy surrounding the other child and the protagonist's conversation with her friend's parents at the end cemented for me that no responsible parent could have written this book.
As I said, it kept my interest, and the imagery was very well done as I 'read' the audiobook and not the illustrated book. The writer is rather gifted in his use of words, but given the disjunctive nature of the subplots, I will terminate my venture into this series here. If he writes another book outside this series, I will give it an opportunity.
The art in this book is very nice, which is why I picked it up. The text of this book is horrible and needs a couple more rounds of editing.
WARNING: SPOILERS
This book is supposed to be about children, but the author doesn't seem to know very much about children. What 12 year old is chilling out at a coffee shop with a 1 year old? In what reality is drawing comic book heros a reason to ostracize a peer, but drawing birds is not? What child watches their brother get kidnapped and thinks "I'm going to get grounded if anyone finds out, so I'm going to go to bed and enter the spooky forest first thing in the morning." The one year old child is very problematic. He just learned to walk and needs balance practice, but easily walks 30 yards away from his caregiver. He's a year old and has 0 teeth. He consistently stays in the wagon all day, even when left completely alone. Without any toys. Later, this one year old is easily confined by a bassinet.
The author wants this book to be about birds, and even has the main character obsessed with a Sibley book. But the author doesn't know anything about birds and it shows. In one scene he describes nuthatches and jays fluttering around a child's head as a magical moment. As a bird watcher, that sounds horribly uncomfortable. And the little girl who is supposed to be obsessed with birds can't ID them calls them by general terms like "Sparrow" and "Jay" and "nuthatch." A 12 year old who has had been obsessively reading and drawing from a Sibley book for the last few months should know more.
Others noted that the author obviously wrote this book with a thesaurus. This is true. This whole book is overly wordy to a silly degree. Who published this? The thesaurus-syndrome was so bad that in many places words are used completely wrong. One character urged the main cha acter to be quiet, and the main "demured" while rushing forward. A governess is not a female governor, nor the title for the wife of a govenor. Dowager is not a fancy word for widow. A bassinet and a cradle and a crib are not the same things; those words aren't interchangeable. I had to turn the vocabulary processing parts of my brain off.
The character interactions are pretty awkward and unnatural. A man in a truck sees a little girl in the woods and pulls a gun on her. Seconds later, he's insisting he needs to protect her and won't let her out of his truck. There aren't shape shifters in this world, why did he pull the gun? The forest queen's soldiers find a little boy in the woods. She gets him drunk on wine to interrogate him, and then makes him second in command of her armies the next morning. Later in her prison the imprisoned bandits blame the 12 year old boy for the Queens actions.
Despite all these issues, I was still determined to finish the book. I hate pulling a DNF and was listening to the book at 1.65 to get out of it quicker. (The audio book narrator is that slow. See my audiobook comments below.) But the final staw was when the evil coyote soldiers appear at the Bandit camp. They tracked the girl there and it doesn't make any sense. These Coyotes work for the witch. They've been told about the girl, but have never seen her. They don't know her motivations. They don't have anything to track her by. She left thier area by truck. She hung around a huge city for a while. She left the city by truck. She then flew and eagle. No one knew where she was headed. She didn't even know where she was going. Somehow the coyotes tracked her and arrived ahead of her. The second she arrives at the Bandit camp, Bandit King (Bandits have no government and the King insists it's just a nickname, but he's clearly in charge) knows that the coyotes are tracking her and that he can use her as bait to lure the coyotes away from their "secret" base filled with hundreds of thousands of people. The base is out in the open and there are children running around, I think the coyotes already know it's there.
**Audiobook Comments**
I listened to this via audiobook. It made the experience so much worse. The narrator talks so slowly that I sped up the book to 1.65 and could still understand her. I think she was trying to sound "musical", but she ended up sounding AI-generated. She draws out and over emphsizes weird words. She mispronounces words all over the place. She was a terrible choice for narrator.
WARNING: SPOILERS
This book is supposed to be about children, but the author doesn't seem to know very much about children. What 12 year old is chilling out at a coffee shop with a 1 year old? In what reality is drawing comic book heros a reason to ostracize a peer, but drawing birds is not? What child watches their brother get kidnapped and thinks "I'm going to get grounded if anyone finds out, so I'm going to go to bed and enter the spooky forest first thing in the morning." The one year old child is very problematic. He just learned to walk and needs balance practice, but easily walks 30 yards away from his caregiver. He's a year old and has 0 teeth. He consistently stays in the wagon all day, even when left completely alone. Without any toys. Later, this one year old is easily confined by a bassinet.
The author wants this book to be about birds, and even has the main character obsessed with a Sibley book. But the author doesn't know anything about birds and it shows. In one scene he describes nuthatches and jays fluttering around a child's head as a magical moment. As a bird watcher, that sounds horribly uncomfortable. And the little girl who is supposed to be obsessed with birds can't ID them calls them by general terms like "Sparrow" and "Jay" and "nuthatch." A 12 year old who has had been obsessively reading and drawing from a Sibley book for the last few months should know more.
Others noted that the author obviously wrote this book with a thesaurus. This is true. This whole book is overly wordy to a silly degree. Who published this? The thesaurus-syndrome was so bad that in many places words are used completely wrong. One character urged the main cha acter to be quiet, and the main "demured" while rushing forward. A governess is not a female governor, nor the title for the wife of a govenor. Dowager is not a fancy word for widow. A bassinet and a cradle and a crib are not the same things; those words aren't interchangeable. I had to turn the vocabulary processing parts of my brain off.
The character interactions are pretty awkward and unnatural. A man in a truck sees a little girl in the woods and pulls a gun on her. Seconds later, he's insisting he needs to protect her and won't let her out of his truck. There aren't shape shifters in this world, why did he pull the gun? The forest queen's soldiers find a little boy in the woods. She gets him drunk on wine to interrogate him, and then makes him second in command of her armies the next morning. Later in her prison the imprisoned bandits blame the 12 year old boy for the Queens actions.
Despite all these issues, I was still determined to finish the book. I hate pulling a DNF and was listening to the book at 1.65 to get out of it quicker. (The audio book narrator is that slow. See my audiobook comments below.) But the final staw was when the evil coyote soldiers appear at the Bandit camp. They tracked the girl there and it doesn't make any sense. These Coyotes work for the witch. They've been told about the girl, but have never seen her. They don't know her motivations. They don't have anything to track her by. She left thier area by truck. She hung around a huge city for a while. She left the city by truck. She then flew and eagle. No one knew where she was headed. She didn't even know where she was going. Somehow the coyotes tracked her and arrived ahead of her. The second she arrives at the Bandit camp, Bandit King (Bandits have no government and the King insists it's just a nickname, but he's clearly in charge) knows that the coyotes are tracking her and that he can use her as bait to lure the coyotes away from their "secret" base filled with hundreds of thousands of people. The base is out in the open and there are children running around, I think the coyotes already know it's there.
**Audiobook Comments**
I listened to this via audiobook. It made the experience so much worse. The narrator talks so slowly that I sped up the book to 1.65 and could still understand her. I think she was trying to sound "musical", but she ended up sounding AI-generated. She draws out and over emphsizes weird words. She mispronounces words all over the place. She was a terrible choice for narrator.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child abuse, Child death, Gun violence, Racism, Sexism, Blood, Police brutality, Kidnapping, Alcohol
I have very rarely ever read YA books, but this one captured my imagination, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one. It was a long read, and there were times I just wanted the narrative to hurry up and finish, but overall, I thought it was well-written, funny, and a good story.